Hestia

A private AI for your Mac

The AI that stays home.

Hestia runs its chat model, its listening and its voice on your own Mac. Nothing you say or write leaves it, unless you choose to link a provider.

See it workRead the pledge

In the making. Not on sale yet.

The pledge

Used privately, forever, throughout the universe.

And it will remain like this, forever.

That is what Hestia is made for, in the words of the person who makes it. Everything else on this page follows from it.

A print in orange and cream on dark paper: a small cratered planet among stars, with Hestia’s fire of ember bars burning on top of it and an empty stool beside the fire.
Hestia, on a small planet of its own. The stool is for you.

  • No account.

    There is nothing to sign up for. Hestia does not know who you are, and it has no server of ours to tell.

  • No reporting back.

    No usage figures, no crash reports, not even a look for updates. The app never gets in touch with us.

  • No end date.

    You buy it once and it stays yours. Every later version is free, if you choose to install it.

See it work

Three things it does without leaving the room.

The scenes below were made for this page. They show how Hestia looks and behaves; they are not recordings, and how fast the real thing is depends on your Mac.

Dictation

Hold a key and talk. The words land where your cursor is.

In any app, not only in Hestia. Your Mac turns your voice into text, and each word is typed in while you are still speaking.

  • Hold the Globe key, or other keys you choose, and let go when you are done.
  • The small black pill is all that shows: a row of embers that rises with your voice.
  • With Parakeet, the speech model that runs inside the app, no sound leaves your Mac. It understands 25 European languages.

A scene made for this page. A key is held down and someone speaks. A small black pill with a row of fire lines appears at the bottom of the screen and rises with the voice, and the words are typed into a message in another app while they are spoken: “Hi Maya, I’ll bring the tent and the stove on Friday. Can you take the maps? See you at the lake.”

The message is in some other app. The key and the black pill are all you see of Hestia.

Chat

Ask. The answer is written on your Mac.

Hestia offers open models that fit your Mac’s memory. The one you use is downloaded once and runs there; after that, a chat needs no internet connection.

  • Hand it a PDF, a spreadsheet, a picture or a recording. With a model on your Mac, it is read there.
  • It can remember what you tell it about yourself. Every such fact is listed in the app, for you to change or delete.
  • For a harder question you can link a cloud model with your own key. Until you do, none is used.

A scene made for this page: a chat in Hestia. Someone types “Write a note to my landlord: the heating has been out since Monday.” and sends it. The model on the Mac, Qwen3.5 2B, writes the note out word by word: “Dear landlord, the heating in my flat has been out since Monday. Could you please have it looked at as soon as possible? Let me know when someone can come by. Thank you.”

Typed, sent and answered in Hestia’s own window. The model named under the answer runs on the Mac.

Conversation

Talk with it. It answers out loud.

Press the round fire button and speak. Hestia hears where your sentence ends, thinks, and answers with a voice. All three steps can run on your Mac.

  • The fire follows your voice while you speak, then its own.
  • Interrupt it whenever you like, and go on typing in the same chat afterwards.
  • Its voice, Kokoro, speaks English.

A scene made for this page: a spoken conversation in Hestia. A fire in the middle of the window rises with the voice of the person speaking, who asks: “What should I cook tonight? I have eggs, spinach and feta.” The window says “Got it”, then “Thinking”, then “Speaking”, and the fire follows Hestia’s voice as it answers: “A spinach and feta omelette. Wilt the spinach in a little butter, pour in the eggs, and crumble the feta on top.” At the foot of the window stand the three models that carry the conversation: Parakeet v3 → Qwen3.5 2B → Kokoro.

No sound on this page: the fire moves to voices made up from the words. In the app it follows the real ones.

Local first

The cloud waits outside, until you ask it in.

Once its models are on your Mac, Hestia is whole without the internet: what thinks, what listens and what speaks all run there. Services of other companies are there if you want them. You link each one yourself, with your own account or key, and you can take it away again.

A print in orange and cream on dark paper: a small stone cottage at night with Hestia’s fire of ember bars glowing in its window, and outside, beside the window, a little sad cloud standing in its own rain.
The cloud, not asked in tonight.

On your Mac

With nothing linked. This is Hestia as it comes.

  • Chat. Open models such as Qwen, Gemma and Llama. Hestia offers the ones that fit your Mac’s memory.
  • Dictation. Into any app, in 25 European languages.
  • Conversation. It listens, and answers out loud in English.
  • Documents, pictures, recordings. PDFs, office files and scans are read, pictures looked at, audio and video turned into text.
  • Notebook and memory. Your notes, and the few things Hestia may remember about you. Each one is yours to change or delete.

Only if you link it

Every outside service Hestia can be linked to today.

  • Groq. Cloud models and cloud transcription, with your own key.
  • OpenRouter. Cloud models from several makers, with your own key.
  • Microsoft OneNote. Your notebooks, kept in step with Hestia’s notebook, through your Microsoft account.
  • Gmail. Lets Hestia send an email for you; it cannot read your mailbox. For now it is set up by hand, in a settings file.

What you send to one of these is handled by that provider, under its terms and its privacy rules, not ours. What goes where

Nothing up its sleeve

Every time Hestia goes online by itself.

A private app should be able to say what it connects to. This is the list, as the app’s code has it. Each line fetches files that anyone can fetch: the server learns your IP address and which file was asked for, as with any download. Nothing about you, and nothing of yours, goes along.

  1. At the first start

    The program that runs the models (llama.cpp), and a first chat model that fits your Mac.

    GitHub, Hugging Face

  2. The first time you add a picture

    The file the chat model needs for seeing.

    Hugging Face

  3. The first time you add a recording, or a link to one

    Two helper programs, ffmpeg and yt-dlp. A recording behind a link is fetched from its site.

    ffmpeg.martin-riedl.de, GitHub

  4. When you choose one

    Another model, a speech model, a voice.

    Hugging Face, GitHub

  5. When you ask for the news

    Headlines and their pictures. This is off until you switch it on.

    The news outlets’ own feeds

  6. To us

    Nothing. No account, no usage figures, no crash reports, no look for updates.

    Nowhere

Every file is checked against a fingerprint fixed in the app before it is used. The careful version of this list is in the Privacy Statement.

A print in orange and cream on dark paper: an office desk at night with an empty in-tray, a desk lamp and a chair, all dusty and joined by cobwebs, a small spider hanging in the moonlight from the window.
Our analytics department. Nobody has ever worked here.

The deal

Buy it once. Keep it for good.

Hestia is still in the making and not on sale yet. When it is, this is the whole deal:

  • You pay once. There is no subscription.
  • After that it is yours to use, with no end date.
  • Every later version is free for you, forever, if you choose to install it.
  • What you do with your app is not our business.
  • One thing we ask: do not pirate it.
Read the TermsPrivacy Statement